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By Root 1198 0

fought over by the Byzantines and the Persians since the days of Justinian. Heraclius and the Byzantines had regained full control of the Holy Land from the Persians barely ten years before the arrival of the Muslims. Moreover, many of the Christians in the region were regarded as schismatics and heretics by the Orthodox authorities in Constantinople, who had oppressed them remorselessly. This is one reason why some of the Christian accounts present conflicting views of the Muslim conquest. It was the Orthodox who usually anathematized the Muslims most fiercely. They were not universally regarded irreconcilably as enemies by all the Christian communities.

In the year after Ajnadain, the Arabian warriors pushed farther north until they arrived before the walls of Damascus, thrusting aside the armies sent against them. A few miles short of the city, they defeated the Byzantine general Baanes. He had denuded the city of its garrison, confident that an ill-equipped desert army had no hope of taking a great city like Damascus. But a Monophysite Christian (Syriac) bishop, who had been treated as a heretic by the Byzantines, informed a Muslim commander, Khalid, that the east gate of the city was weakly defended, and even supplied the Muslims with ladders to scale the wall. Once the Byzantines learned of the breach, they quickly came to terms with the Muslim general, Abu Ubaid, camped on the far side of the city. The two Muslim forces met in the center of the city, and Abu Ubaid insisted that it should be respected and its people not put to the sword. Part of Damascus was ceded and the remainder conquered. For some time, half the Cathedral of St. John was used for Christian worship, and half was turned into a mosque. A flimsy partition wall, hastily erected, divided the two faiths.

Ibn Khaldun, writing in the fourteenth century, attributed the success of the desert Arab tribes to their wild spirit. But they also proved adaptable. Poor infantrymen acquired horses and camels, and thereafter wore Byzantine swords and armor. In 636, the Muslims created the military towns that became the key element in their subsequent advance. Here the tribes encamped, and could be called to prayer on Fridays. Muslim discipline and social control could be enforced. But they also needed to be satiated, on a regular basis, with fresh conquest. Wars of conversion were a religious duty, but they were also a means of social mobility, taking tribesmen from desert poverty toward a settled life, free from want. It seems paradoxical that the Arab soldiers, whose ethos was built upon individual prowess, could act with such cohesion. However, the morality of Islam had emerged from within the values of a tribal society. There remained profound tensions between conflicting loyalties to tribe and to the service of God, but despite the contradictions, the Muslim system worked.

In the Levant much of the Christian Arab population soon converted to Islam.13 The new faith was appealing:

The chief attraction of Islam was that it was practical; it did not demand seemingly superhuman efforts … The Christian East on the eve of the Islamic conquest had forgotten the limitations of human nature. Many members of the Church desired to imitate the angels; hence the mass movements towards the sexless life of monks and nuns; hence the exodus from towns and villages into the desert; hence the feats of self-mortification which showed the extent to which men could subdue their bodies at the dictates of the spirit. Some of these Eastern ascetics slept only in a standing position, others immured themselves in dark cells or lived on pillars, or ate only herbs, and even those not more than once a week.

Islam stopped all these excesses. It swept away the exaggerated fear of sex, discarded asceticism, banished the fear of hell for those who failed to reach perfection, quenched theological enquiry … Islam was like the sand of the desert … It created a sense of solidarity and brotherhood which had been lost among the contending Christians.14

Not surprisingly, from the first days of the